Fake Out: Words and Pictures Reviewed

Buzzed about as a different kind of summer movie, Words and Pictures
holds the right ingredients but lacks real flavor. It tries to revive
the timeless debate of the pen versus the paintbrush, with an English
teacher and art instructor at a Maine prep school going to war, but the unimaginative screenplay
undermines the clever concept, and the plot is buried by its
protagonists’ artistic crises and forced romance.

Clive Owen plays the disgruntled English teacher, Jack
Marcus. Sipping vodka from a thermos during lunch, “Mr. Mark” is a
functioning alcoholic whose “fire has gone out,” in his own words. He’s
an Updike-quoting, one-hit wonder of the literary world, popular among
the students but scruffy with the stress of long-term writer’s block.

Opposite Jack is the lively new arts teacher, Ms. Dina
Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), who sticks out her tongue at everything
with usual Binoche charm, smirking through worsening rheumatoid
arthritis. An established painter from New York, she now shuffles around
with a cane, too proud to ever take the school’s elevator. Director
Fred Schepisi takes his time with Dina’s struggle, using a dozen
piano-backed montages to show her attempts to maintain her craft while
out of her element, constantly modifying her technique with different
brushes and tools to save her weak joints.

Ignited by their egos and bored with the school’s army of
texting droids, the two teachers begin a series of exhibitions to prove
their own craft’s superiority. In one display from the English class,
there’s a picture of girl in a sparkly dress blowing a kiss. Below the
picture is a caption spelling out the damaging culture of beauty among
American youth. In response, the art students play a looped video of
news anchors, their words blending together into a meaningless mess. The
video of one journalist is paired with an image of a starving child
standing in a war-torn street. The competition offers a few thoughtful
presentations, but most of the artillery is a barrage of trite literary
quotations. We hear Shakespeare, Twain, Whitman—but no refreshing turns
of phrase from the screenplay itself, written by Gerald di Pego.

Di Pego’s banal writing can only go so far, even with the
talented Owen and Binoche. “Doesn’t anybody want to change the
world?” cries Binoche to her students, just one of many cliches. When first faced with Jack’s declaration that words are more powerful
than images, she actually replies, without a hint of sarcasm or irony,
“A picture is worth a 1000 words.” She is as stereotypical an art
teacher as they come, grabbing her students by the shoulders and shaking
them to tears, begging for real emotion and higher standards of
self-expression.

It’s a shame Words and Pictures lacks the comedy and chemistry of Schepisi’s ‘80s classic Roxanne.
Such shallow, one-dimensional characters don’t make for much more than
insincere masks, and the film turns these two Academy Award-nominated
actors into teens pretending to be drunk at their first party,
enthusiastically trying to play themselves off as crazy artists.